On a dank August afternoon in Manhattan, the sky has cleared over Washington Square Park long enough for 070 Shake to put me in check. We’re sitting on a bench near the city’s finest chess hustlers, playing the game Shake loves. I move my king away from certain death for the moment, but its turns are numbered. As the 22-year-old performer born Danielle Balbuena carefully maneuvers her pieces around the board, she talks to me about her debut album—the one people have been waiting for since she turned Kanye into a blip on his own song with her star-making hook on 2018’s “Ghost Town.”
When we meet in August, she has already been working on the album for a full year. But she’s not a perfectionist looking to add a dash of polish. In fact, the idea of releasing music that’s too synthetic frightens her. “It’s too Barbie right now,” she huffs. “I need to distort some vocals, make it more real. I don’t want to make it better, I want to make it worse.”
Shake’s eyes dart around the board, seeking openings. Her long, curly hair is draped over a crew neck depicting an endless loop that reads “You Bomb People -> They Get Angry -> They Bomb You -> You Get Angry.” She’s got a tattoo of the numbers 070 that looks like a percent sign near her left temple and a double helix near her right. There’s a crucifix wrapped around her neck, a gift from her girlfriend, model Sophia Diana Lodato, but she doesn’t identify as religious, only as a person with a strong relationship with God. “I grew up in churches but I have my own beliefs.”
It doesn’t take long for her to begin sharing those beliefs, on all sorts of topics. She calls social media an “evil force” and she’s wary of technology. She finds anarchist communes appealing. She considers the public school system in her home state of New Jersey one of the worst in the country (even though it was ranked No. 1 in the nation last year). She won’t take a hardliner stance on Trump, or Kanye’s support of him, but she mentions Hawaiian congresswoman and Democratic presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard as someone with vision who can make real, lasting change. She doesn’t care for cellphones and doesn’t even own one. “I don’t like to have to answer people, to have mad radiation, to be controlled by a device,” she says. “I like to live free.”
She picks up her knight and whisks my queen off the board in a single motion. “Check.”
A pursuit of unfiltered originality drives 070 Shake’s debut album, Modus Vivendi, which is Latin for “way of life.” At this point, the record has been in the offing for several months, but it kept getting delayed, in part because Shake kept tinkering with it. There were other hurdles, too: Last summer, she was bitten by a tick in the woods, and got Lyme disease. The album is finally out this week, long after her buzzy moment ended—but it never seemed to be about that for her anyway. If she found her voice on “Ghost Town,” Modus Vivendi shows her finding her range.
The malleability of Shake’s delivery has given her a leg up on other leaders of the post-genre crowd. Her music is often classified as emo-rap, but while her songs can be emo, and she does, at times, rap, more often than not, neither tag applies. She is constantly playing with contrasts—raw and smooth, light and dark, harsh and tender—and the songs on Modus Vivendi seem to shift with her mood. Almost all of them are unconventionally arranged, pushing away from easy listening; no two of them have the same drum programming.
The album was produced by Dave Hamelin, former drummer and frontman of the post-Interpol 2000s indie band the Stills, who has spent the last few years compiling studio credits for artists including Broken Social Scene’s Kevin Drew and masked New York rapper Leikeli47. “Neither of us is trying to keep up with the Joneses on any level,” Hamelin says, adding that he wanted to bridge gaps between shoegaze, post-rock, and hip-hop.
The album’s moody, spaced-out tone underscores its lyrics, which are often glimpses into relationships facing their breaking point. Shake writes in dreamy fragments, and her scenes are evocative. On “Come Around,” she’s fiending for love, but it’s tantalizingly unclear if her insatiability is fed. Elsewhere, she revels in the little comforts of having a person who cares: “It’s nice to have someone to hold you/Tell you they chose you/Someone you can’t fool ’cause they know you,” she mutters on “Nice to Have.” Meanwhile, “Divorce” dwells on the prospect of two people uncoupling. “Why’d you ever say you wanna leave me?” she asks, but that’s as far as the conversation goes.
When Hamelin originally made the beat for “Divorce,” he thought it was too strange to be anything more than an instrumental, but Shake found a way into the track and worked up a demo that changed the way he heard the production. Their relationship is a cycle of reproduction. By the time Hamelin was finishing the record, he was building songs up around Shake’s vocals. The producer describes the dreamy “Terminal B” as a new take on dream-pop idols the Cocteau Twins, and Shake is constantly changing shape within it. After steadily layering vocal harmonies on “Microdosing,” which refers to taking small amounts of psychedelic drugs, Shake’s runs lead directly into a Mike Dean keyboard solo that sounds like a laser light show. Throughout, she is in complete command. It’s hard to believe she’s still pretty new to this.
Shake grew up in the township of North Bergen, New Jersey, a ferry ride away from Manhattan across the Hudson River. She describes it as a place where there’s “just a bunch of kids on drugs.” Her mom, who works as an elementary school security guard, migrated from the Dominican Republic when she was a teenager. Their relationship was fractured during Shake’s adolescence. “I was gay—still am, going strong—and she wasn’t fucking with that,” Shake explains. “My whole life I was hiding because I was scared as hell. I was tomboyish, and she would say things like, ‘I rather you be in jail than be gay.’ That was the mindset that was imprinted on her.” Shake’s mom finally accepted her daughter’s sexuality as she came into adulthood, and these days she will stay with Shake’s girlfriend at their house in Los Angeles when Shake spends long nights at the studio.
Growing up, Shake felt alienated at home and at school. She suffered from ADHD and couldn’t sit still for her classes, so she was put on Adderall and into Special Ed. She says she was usually suspended for roughly 80 days out of a given school year. “Giving a kid pills isn’t really the smartest thing to do,” she adds. At 13, she became addicted to Adderall, and she blames the school’s prescription. “They made me this person but they hated me.”
It was in that alienation that she found writing as a means of self-expression. “I didn’t ever ‘get into poetry’; I just was poetry,” she tells me. “It was the only way for me to properly express how I felt without fucking killing anybody.” She’d write about the pain induced by loneliness. Music was a source of comfort, too. “The drugs just sunk me into a deeper hole, but listening to Kid Cudi helped me get through that hole.” Cudi’s genre-mashing Man on the Moon records, which deal in disaffection and drug abuse, seem to be at the center of her taste.
A fascination with R&B and alternative music—particularly Radiohead, Frank Ocean, Paramore, the Weeknd, and Alicia Keys—and a love of beatboxing led her to commit her poetry to song. Picking through Drake type beats online, she recorded her first verses in a friend’s closet in 2015 before migrating to a series of makeshift recording spaces where the owners would also deal drugs. Her early SoundCloud songs were produced in those sessions in 2015—“and they sound like it,” she admits with a laugh.
Soon, Shake met local rapper Phi at a studio, and the 070 collective, so named for their local area code, began to take shape, with its membership being in constant flux. Shake’s songs, produced by 070’s in-house production team the Kompetition, began to open up a bit more, letting loose her raw vocal power and letting go of R&B conventions.
Everything started coming together in 2016, when promotor and social influencer YesJulz heard Shake’s early song “Proud” and instantly signed on to manage her. Through Julz, Shake caught Pusha T’s ear, and he signed her to GOOD Music soon after. She opened for the 1975 that fall. By 2018, Shake was working with her idols, Cudi and Kanye West.
She was at the center of Kanye’s Wyoming sessions that year, which led to albums including Pusha-T’s Daytona and the Kanye-Cudi project Kids See Ghosts, and she says the experience felt like finding a home. “I’d never been in that sort of environment. It allowed me to unveil and blossom.” Working on such a grand scale so quickly after beginning her career gave her the opportunity to step outside herself and write for others, a learning process that came with some aches and pains. “Having to write from someone else’s point of view felt limiting,” she says. “It made me appreciate not collaborating way more.”
Being in the room with Kanye and his think tank taught her more about craft and technique, but she says she never got fully sucked into the vortex of the superstar’s creative orbit. She thinks of those sessions as an opportunity to fine-tune under the tutelage of a master, another step toward her ultimate goal. “I have tunnel vision,” she says. “I cannot get off track.”
After our chess match, over vegan Mexican dishes at a packed restaurant on the Lower East Side, Shake describes the studio as her sanctuary, a spiritual place requiring specific energy. “I can’t have people there,” she says. “I feel like they’re waiting for The Hit. If so, you’re going to be waiting all fucking year. That’s not how it works for me.” She operates on instinct. At any given moment, she is in search of the “realest feeling.” She’s a freestyler that will let everything “disperse” out of her in a one-take performance.
Shake’s music is triggered by analysis of her interactions with the people around her. “I’m very into human emotion and I like studying people, seeing what makes them smile, what makes them cringe, what makes them fucking frown,” she says. “Sometimes I just want to make someone feel something, so I will act out of myself just to get a reaction—it’s like an experiment.” She’s been with her girlfriend for four years now—they met on Instagram—and it’s that relationship that has stoked her recent creativity most. “It’s exactly what I need to be inspired,” she says with a mischievous grin.
“Feeling” is a word that comes up often in conversation with Shake and Hamelin as they talk about Modus Vivendi: Shake refers to her music as a “feeling put into frequency,” and Hamelin says that feeling she’s conveying is “somewhere between Trent Reznor, Robert Smith, and Björk.” They toiled on the album for over a year, with some contributions from GOOD Music studio mainstay Mike Dean, sending ideas back and forth across the country before locking themselves in a studio for months at a time. “Her creative vision, her dexterity, she can just do things that other people can’t do,” Hamelin says.
For her part, Shake seems eager for this record to come out just so she can move on to the next one. She sounds like a stargazer when describing what she wants to do going forward—she’s “searching for something more” and “finding different ways to do things.” Chess board tucked under her arm, she tries to explain her vision to me. I don’t quite understand it. Like a grandmaster, she already seems to be several moves ahead.
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